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Straining the last of my sticky Xmas gift from my bees. Means not much to many but heaps to me. Can't bare wasting a scrap. Every drop is a bees hard work. Just the last slow dribble to work it's way through the tasty (yep) cappings that clog up my strainer. Two buckets,a 3 frame hand spinner, some stickiness, and a happy woman.

At this part of world we have little time to relax while expecting to 2020. finish.. Now we are 2 hours in 2021. aaand I must say this person who invented six packs is mean person.. We were emptying them really fast.. But for once in the year we are on the loose.. Tomorrow reset into new season.. What didn't kill us last season made us stronger.. Take care for loving ones, worrying about things that you can't change won't do you or yours any good. Life is too short, enjoy it..

In contrast to a lot of people I've had the most marvellous year ! Thanks to covid emptying a lot of roads down south the motorcycling has been very enjoyable, and also thanks to lockdown I've had a lot more to do with our local community, and thanks to Jacinda (take that Trev) my pension has kept rolling in.....not the tiniest grump from me. Happy New Year All.

I recently did a AFB check for a new beekeeper who was really struggling to get someone to check 7 hives. I’m sure glad this newbie was there to explain the history of each hive as I would have been very confused with what I found. There was no AFB evident and I was happy to put my name on the sheet of paper to say so. But 5 of the hives had been attempts to split nukes off the one moderately strong hive due to worries it would swarm. The beekeeper had mistakenly identified drone cells for queen cells. But we had a grand time, they had never seen eggs or lava in the bottom of cel

My very first harvest! Super on for one month, 8 frames harvested...20kgs...beautiful...very happy!

Yes, despite that some people had difficulties in 2020, especially those in the hospitality or tourist industry, for me anyhow it's been a pretty good year. Other than some incompetencies at the border, we seem to have defeated the pandemic relatively easily, by using what amounts to the fairly simple technique of preventing it from spreading from one to another. Just common sense really. Looking at other countries I realise how lucky we are here. Most countries do not have the suitable politicians or political will, or stupid or selfish populations, that they just cann

Well Jamesc.. I am under influence of warm schnapps aaand I better to don't talk for long. I will try to be short, fogyish weather, treated with OA, seems conditions to it work are superb. Like in some really old American movie " Damn torpedoes, full speed ahead". Jamesc, try warm schnapps instead of voltaren ( recently I got strange headache, I took dose of warm schnapps - I felt like dliverance ). While I am in good mood all the best to beeks all over the world, full speed into New Year ( don't look back)

Well, thank goodness that 2020 is now in the rubbish bin. Let's hope for a much better 2021, however, I am not so sure that will happen as we still have to deal with the effects of 2020. It looks like the weather has turned into the warm stuff here in Manawatu. I am rather sick of the wet, cold and wind that we have had. Anyway. Enough of the grumping. I wish everyone a very fruitful and prosperous New Year. I pray that your God gives you everything that you need in 2021.

You may recall towards the end of last year, I was saddened to hear of the death of one of the software developers and unfortunately the major impact it had on the development of some of the modules we were implementing at NZBees. I've also since seen some considerable impact from changes the software vendors have made to licensing arrangements and access to third party add-ons, which has ultimately had a knock on effect with regards to development growth and updates. As a result I will need to make some significant changes to the site in order that it can remain secure

I'm a little far away to provide physical help, ie, not likely to get to your bees even if the border was open. But, I can provide some 'been there' kind of experience to help you relax. Years ago, wife and I had our first bees, we fussed and fussed over them. They swarmed, did everything we didn't want, we kinda gave up. It was early July for us, so, roughly the same part of the season as you are in now. At that point we essentially abandoned the bees for a couple months, distracted by other priorities (our wedding and the obligatory trip after). When we finally got back to c

Swift check from above, since one lost early in December all alive so far. There are couple more which are on the edge, but according to varroa strike majority seem normal.. I must keep mouth shut

Yes that is a worry. What I think was happening was that the governmenmt was desperate for everyone to follow the plan. Cos if enough people didn't, we would be like all the other countries and still have a panmdemic going on now. So because some people were committed, and some less so, and some people crying hardship, the government had to dole out money to just about everyone who wanted it plus some who did not, in order to keep everyone on board and achieve the eradication of the virus. Yes it was a cost. Had the pandemic not be controlled and we still had an out of

Well thare yah go.... the coast with most came to the party.....these babies are off to visit Roy at Otira....honey and all. I guess we’ll strip them down when the rain stops.

FD box with grotty frames has been successfully adopted by the Queen and her workers.I now have a rediculous amount of bees and brood that I can happily sell.....Or can I? I have to keep reminding myself that I want to get rid of my FD gear!!! Got covered in bees and got the giggles. Husband reluctantly took a photo from a VERY long way away. Now the question is. Will I get around to selling it? I am not sure what would be a fair price if I do? 3/4 of the frames are really good. Boxes are fine. As of today there were 7 very full frames of capped brood,but one has reasonab

This past year I have watched local commercial beekeepers adding value to their honey and marketing it with skill - facebook pages, great websites, offering attractive packages online, etc. I also find it useful being able to taste the honeys at Farmers Markets and this has led me to buy some - even though I have some at home. But there are other places your honey can be sold other than supermarkets. I have seen specific apiary stands offering honey in dairies, cafes, fruit stalls, and touristy homeware shops. My contribution today is to suggest working backwards from Who

So many parts of the country with no excess honey flow. Hives are maintaining weight (barely). Some sites require a hive or two topping up with some syrup. On the positive side, the weather has settled somewhat and finally getting a better percentage of queens mated. Hives that haven’t performed have been used to split for replacements and hopefully a few increases.

A lot of your success or failure will be due to the location of your mating sites. Last year we moved our nuc mating yards up into the forestry. In our original sites we were running at a 60-80% success rate in a good year....... 20-30% in a poor year. The new sites are old skid sites, surrounded by pines and very warm on blustery Nor'West day. This year we got over 95% on the units we made up , and even in cold wet weather they seem to get the odd hour to achieve success. Location, Location, Location .....

I don't know if this is what you want to hear but I recall the site was once straightforward simple and intuitive. Last year or so it's gotten fatter with features no-one understands and steadily less intuitive. Going forward I vote for simplicity.

The other little job I did today was check a swarm I picked up before Christmas. It was on a fencepost next to some hives we had in pollination. The cocky was a bit worried that he had paid a bit if coin for a hive that had swarmed. So I was relieved to see the queen had a blue dot on her thorax We do ‘nt mark queens, so it must be one if the neighbours.

I’d be pretty happy with that....but like they say.... you can always stack the numbers to fit the cause. Going by those numbers I should have about $2,000,000 worth of product sitting in my shed.... and more coming in by the day. Me thinks some of these guys who write the reports should be given a shovel and ride the trolley to the coalface.

just unfortunate that we actually needed to. its ironic that our underfunded, under resourced and poorly managed early covid response actually resulted in the best course of action. absolutely brilliant piece of govt BS to call it "fast and early" when it was "slow and late" which forced us into lockdown. had we tried to do it like Australia has done, we would have ended up like everyone else. fortunately our systems where so crap that it completely failed and we had to resort to the lockdown, which was the best move.

I am always ready to welcome a New Year. Love it. Sky was clear last night.Moon still reasonbly full. Had a bunch of friends and neighbours around and lit the outside fire. (An old washing machine bowl ) And yes it is supposed to be Summer! In bed at 3 and up at 8 with not a smidgen of a hangover. Now a decent days work is behind me, I have quietness at last and life is good. Wishing everybody a fantastic 2021.Bee happy, bee kind and have lots and lots of fun.

A glorious day here in the 'Naki. No pre 31 December harvest here due to a very late start, but Pohutukawa and clover are going nuts, with a bit of lotus and boxes are filling up fast, with the first hopefully coming off next week. Sampling at the hives are indicating a tasty brew.

Kind of reminds me of a case from a few years ago. A guy with beehives in his back yard complained to the council about his neighbours dogs that barked a lot. Eventually the neigbour was required to get rid of the dogs. He was not able to re home them, so they were destroyed. Naturally, the neighbour was extremely upset. So he hit back, and complained about the beekeepers bees. They had been pooping on his property and that of other neighbours, but people had been good enough not to complain. But after his dogs were destroyed he called in the Council, who looked at all the poop, sa

Urban areas can be extremely productive with a friend of mine on bluff hill Napier once producing 200 kg in a year. At the time the area was probably under stocked. The trouble with urban areas is that most of the area is made up of roads roofs and lawns and while there is usually a very diverse supply of nectar sources they are also very limited and easily over utilised. Up till about 20 years ago there was little or no pressure on beekeeping sites in most areas and apiarys were normally around 2 miles apart with many of them being in the same place for decades. This gave good opportu

Forgot sold all the honey for decent price, if increase own consumption of honey, I will have to buy from local beeks who still have little honey left - that ALSO I wish You all the same..

I had a similar situation with a neighbour who is establishing an Avocado orchard. She asked if I would put hives on her property. The orchard is less than 800 metres from my current apiary and while I told her my bees would cover that distance, she wanted hives closer to her trees. In order to prevent her arranging someone else to put hives there and risking both overstocking and disease, I opted to place some of my hives there and it has worked out well. Popping next door to tend them isn't arduous and she has been extremely interested in learning about the bees and very proactiv

We are done for the year. Bees on sites, boxes on ..... Done and dusted. I went for a last round check the end of last week. The Coast bees are making a good living despite the stop start nature to the season. The Rata is showing some good colour and if the weather played ball, the bees might reward us for our effort. The radishes are in full flower with a lot of seed set, but not a lot of honey on to write home about The clover is looking really good, with cut hay paddocks coming white with new flower, and it may well be time to think about pulling bees ou

well happy new year every one, its been a while since i have been on here, whats happened at our end, first off we took no honey off last season, what honey we took off was by the box full this then went onto autumn splits, good thing we did this as we seemed to lose alot of hives for no real reason at all, hive sites have been looked at to the view...are they producing the type of honey we want, if not they are gone, the other thing is are the hives we seem to have to travel from one end of marlborough to the other worth the cost, if poorer producer they are gone, sales.. well if it

nice work @Oma

For sure it has been an interesting year and there have been some winners and some losers . The thing that i find interesting is the fact that the government has borrowed something like 70 thousand dollars per household from somewhere on our behalf and there are so many people out there that think that they are better off or no worse off. I am not saying that what the government did was right or wrong because I simply don't know but I do know that this borrowing will have a cost somehow, sometime.

Sure Daniel - definitely relatable. In relation to AFB work in NZ, dogs have been tested and phages have been isolated (viruses specific for AFB bacteria). But we cant just transplant them into NZ - the bacteriophages wouldnt be allowed across the border and the dogs would be too expensive I guess. Our work is brand new and hence why we're publishing it - so that it can be peer reviewed, improved and hopefully adopted. I am not complaining that there was no beekeeping funding of the work - we never asked for any. But without research and industry funding, NZ beekeepers are goin

Detector dogs could help save bees WWW.SUNLIVE.CO.NZ Training dogs to sniff out the highly infectious bacterial disease American Foulbrood in beehives could save New Zealand’s... article on detector dogs with funding support from a number of areas/groups. Not a single word from the management agency, may speak volumes. However since taking a lot of the work inhouse and taking on new staff their stance may have changed? I didn't know "previous methods have led to inconclusive results in the field", does anyone have proof to back up such

Last minute change for me, so I'm not doing any manuka this season, so have decided to leave hives in the paddock. Most time i've spent with family this time of year, being run ragged by 3yr old grandaughter, woulndn't change a thing.

Yo ..... I was going to get back to this, but thought it too much info for one post. Canine Modus Operandii. Dogs do not like bees, and generally once stung, get stung shy. There is a time and place for their use. Generally the handler goes out very early morning, or late in the evening, when the bees are home. Best results are on the cooler days. Warm nights when the bees are humming at the front door are not ideal. Most of the dog work on live hives is done in the winter, spring and early autumn. In the early days we had on

Kick in the teeth ..... no not really. We initiated our dog program to solve a problem that was knawing away at us .... employing overseas staff who didn't appreciate the seriousness of AFB and so making us think outside the square to solve the problem , which we have. What we discovered was that the dogs were quite good at what they did. They aren't a one shot wonder, but a very effective tool to do large scale rapid screening ..... 800 hives in an evening session was the record I think. The kick in the the teeth was when we suggested to the industry that the dogs might be quite a g

Hmm.. Bit hard to unravel, but seems like the two players are Gerald Pearce and Roger Pearce. Gerald's property is totally landlocked with no road to it, but he has always accessed it through Rogers property and built a track through it. Gerald farmed his property plus had a beekeeper on it. No issues for some years. Trouble started 2 years ago when Roger decided to also get some bees on his property. Gerald then took legal action to limit the number of hives that Roger could have. This naturally created bad feelings, so Roger decided to hit back, and told Gerald he co

That must feel like a bit of a kick in the teeth after all the work and $$ you put into your program. it’s a shame mpi didn’t support you then and we could be years down the track with this research.

I put our very low incidence of AFB these days to the fact that we've been running AFB dogs for a number of years ....persistent, patient pressure , screening and quarantines has paid dividends. Somewhere on the Net is Sarah Hights d oco ....'A million dollar Nose' that documents a day in the life of AFB dog Georgie. The agency was against the idea of dogs as a screening method from day one, then back tracked a few years ago to say they might consider the idea after 'rigorous scientific testing' ..... so at last someone has had a quiet word with MPI and persuaded them to fund some resea

Here is a graphic representation of that. The hive in question is a double deep lang, and it gets two supers at the start of the flow, both drawn. We try treat it exactly the same year over year as it sits on the scale and becomes our sentinel for measuring and comparing the flows year over year. The only manipulation of the data is to remove the artifacts from adding and removing supers. 2014 was the first year we put the scale under the colony, and the spring honey flow lasted exactly 9 days, those who did not have colonies 'ready for flow' at that time, missed the flow. 2015

Something like that, but hits instant. Some people which can't controll themselves end under the table fast.. In cold days it warms you fast and relax. I rather take schnapps than pills.. This autocorrect on mobile phone is killing me, it changes all I write to something else.. have to check all I wrote..

Honey time!

Potential for spray damage. You need to talk to them. So they understand what the bees require. Empty hives are not an option at the gardeners are not that stupid they would not see that there are any bees flying.

vegans are nut jobs at the best of times. its more about "look at me, i'm better than you and i'm going to tell you all about it" than anything tangible.

Having hives on a shed roof is a good idea until you have to put your 5th FD super on a hive and need a ladder. At least I built a flat level platform. I'm disappointed that the cam locks aren't long enough for 7 boxes.. I had to find 2 strops to do the job..

While it can be the ultimate in STIs (sexually transmitted infections . . as is nosema apparently), I believe the queen usually gets infected when the levels in a hive get to the point where she is fed infected food. It would be interesting to follow a hive and test the eggs for DWV - I would imagine this would start or accelerate the actual collapse of the hive

Yes. Also the European or Australian model. We are very fortunate that we were able to shut down a couple of little islands in the South Pacific.

the 'baited box' as above contains 8 bare top bars with no foundation nor starter except for a triangle of wood at 33-34mm centres. In the centre of the box are the remaining two, both fully drawn combs, these have been baited by pouring 2:1 syrup into the cells on one side of each comb. The syrup stays put with surface tension. It is not enough to count as feeding about one cup total it acts as a house warming gift that ensures plenty of visitors into the box. Nekminit the whole box is fully drawn.. The first time (Papamoa) I did this I used a five frame box, I can't remember

useless pic for @jamesc taken today, should give the general idea. Getting close to my height limit for working safely. Ten undrawn full depth frames in the stack, and another about half a box of frames not yet filling up. A lot of nectar and capped honey on board. Pohutukawa has kicked off. Will be taking honey off it rather than going any higher...

A wee bit of drama here the past few weeks in our bit of Upper Hutt paradise. Got a notification two weeks back from the Management Agency that there was an AFB case within 2 kms of us and that they were doing mandatory inspections of all apiaries in the area. This notification came while I was working through a diagnostic process with one of my hives that was foremost on my mind. A previously strong hive had gotten slow and groggy; just not happy and healthy. I re-queened the hive, did all my disease, mite and health checks, changed out old brood boxes with new, replaced (and bur